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ghostonline's Archive

A bit late, but important for me nonetheless. I am going to participate in this Ludum Dare too.

I will use Haxe with the excellent HaxePunk and OpenFL libraries. As always, I will use a combination of The GIMP and Pixen for my game art and BFXR for sound effects (if my schedule and time permits).

After my failed attempt at the previous compo, I am going to redouble my efforts this time. My code will be available during the competition through my Github repository.

As usual, my tools of choice are Python with Pyglet and Planar, GIMP for art and SFXR for sound effects. I am not sure what to use for music yet, but when I get to it, I will make a decision on the spot. Probably a music generator, though 😉

I am going to use some boilerplate code (already at Github) containing a reader for the Tiled map file format.

Had a good night sleep and am ready to get cracking. Experience with the previous two LD had taught me that I often get the most done on this day. Quick time check: a little under 17 hours left until the deadline. Exciting 😛

Okay, what needs to be done:
– Come up with one more gameplay element
– Replace programmer art with graphic assets
– Add sound
– Add background music
– Design a few levels (10-ish should be enough)

Any time left will be spend on adding more special effects (particles! yay!) and GUI improvements (level select screen, instructions screen). After 4am, I will package the game up for Linux 32- and 64-bit, so anyone with a Linux box should be able to play. Windows users will probably get a 32-bit version tomorrow, but I will still try to get it done today.

The game is playable, contains two not very interesting levels and a simple dialog screen to transition between levels. If I wanted to, I could call it ‘feature complete’ and start focussing on content, adding bells and whistles and end up with a decent looking game. Trouble is that the game currently is not very interesting. It is basically ‘isolate the coloured ball as efficiently as possible’ and almost always involves placing at most three lines (triangle around the ball). Anyone with a bit spatial awareness will spot the solution in a few seconds. Not very impressive.

It was time to re-examine the game concept and, as luck would have it, it was time for dinner. I made myself a pizza and took a long hot shower, while pondering what I could do to improve the game. Then I remembered one of Jonathan Blow’s presentations about defining a world and then let gameplay rules present itself by examining its boundaries. In this case, the world is defined by a group of static red circles and a single static yellow circle. These two types must be separated by one or more straight lines, drawn with the mouse. Whenever one or more red circles are separated by a line, they will become inactive. The player wins by make all the red circles become inactive.

Now I have the rules of the world defined, I can experiment with modifying them. Consider the yellow circle: what if we have two yellow circles? Should these be grouped together to win the game or, to keep in the spirit of the theme, should they both be isolated from each other? How about making the yellow circle drift towards its nearest active red circle? Can the yellow circle switch places with a red one under certain circumstances? Which circumstances would those be?

These questions, all originating from the system I have designed right now, could all make a more interesting game. Let’s see what the rest of the evening will bring :). Onwards!

It took some time, but an idea is starting to form in my mind. It allows for quick iteration of features, so I can build the game first and then spend the rest of the competition enriching the gameplay. I intend to have the basic gameplay finished in a few hours. Things just got a bit more exciting!

After a good night sleep and some healthy breakfast, I was mulling over the theme for this competition. Although I feel I could go for a story-driven game, I cannot even draw myself out of a paper bag if I wanted to. So, I will keep on brainstorming on my game idea.

In the meantime, an enumeration of my tools of choice:

For coding I will use C++ with SFML, although I might opt for an additional engine if the game requires it. As always, I will use my tricked out Vim application to write the code.

Graphic assets will be drawn using GIMP and sound assets, if any, will be generated by the excellent SFXR tool by Dr. Petter. For now, music will be absent, but time permitting I will have a look at a procedural music generator (Wolfram Tunes or something like that).

So this is going to be my work environment for the next two days. Obligatory workspace picture:

Only one day until the Ludum Dare starts. My pc and tools are almost ready, I can relate with most of the 20 final themes being voted for, my girl is going to stock up on brain food today (thanks, babe!) and I intend to go to bed at a sane time tonight!

Alright. Had a good night sleep and woke up discovering this LD theme was ‘Escape’. I think I can work with that. Yesterday, I had my computer fully set up, ran some tests (currently I am having some sound issues, but I can work around that) and everything is ready to go.

During breakfast, I contemplated what I should create this weekend and enjoyed the final scenes of the quite emotional finale of Australia’s Masterchef (season 1). Fully rested, fed and relaxed, I think I can safely start this marathon. With a ‘escapy’ idea slowly forming in the back of my mind, I have started my terminal program, logged into the necessary services and turned up the music.

For my game, I will use Python with the Pyglet library. If relevant, I will design my levels using Tiled and load it into the game with the tmx-loader library for python (floating around on the Tiled wiki). Graphics will be done in Gimp and sound effects using the excellent Sfxr program. I have no idea what program I could use to alleviate my musically challenged brain, though. We will see.

The command prompt beckons for my attention, time to go to work. Good luck everyone!

To facilitate level design, I have implemented support for tmx files, the level format generated by Tiled. And it was not that difficult to implement either (about 40 mins). Time well spent, I would say

I finished up the collision detection routine last night. I felt I could not go to sleep until I got something going and somehow CD always gives me some sort of troubles. In the end, I noticed I was coding a system that was way to general and ambitious for my game, so I replaced it with a dead simple system that just tries to move, checks against a bitmap and reverts back to the original position if something is hit. No normals, separating axis theorem or anything.

Today I have some social obligations, so I cannot code full time, but I still feel I can create some game before the deadline. Ah, ambition

Now, where is my cup of tea and breakfast?

EDIT: The obligatory breakfast photo – a cup of tea and some healthy ‘musli’ (not sure how it is called in English)